Halloween Lesson Plan

Funny you should ask... i just did a demo class on Halloween last week! it took a bit of prep (well, a lot) but it was a hit!1. find a halloween vocabulary list. i used one that i found online that came with printable flashcards. "witch, trick or treat, werewolf, skeleton..." i downloaded a "halloween" font on my computer and made a poster board with all of the words on it. mine was too small - i suggest making it as large as possible. Go over the vocab with the kids - teaching them proper pronunciation, this was particularly fun with "Vampire"... 2. make a "word scramble" with the vocab words to reinforce them (i only used the scramble later in the class to see how much they remembered) make sure to hide your vocab list while they are doing this!3. i found an easy one page "history of halloween" on the net to hand out to the class. we read it together, out loud, to practice reading and speaking at the same time. then i asked them easy questions about the text "when is halloween?" etc.4. my co-teacher and i prepared a jack-o-lantern in advance and went over what we did to make it to the class - we had considered getting them all to make one, but not only would that be really expensive, but much too time consuming as well... so we made one. we even baked the seeds and passed them out to the class.(this is where we gave out the word scramble)5. then we played the "trick or treat game" - i found this online somewhere... we have a box (i decorated mine with orange paper and drew halloweeny pictures on it) in the box there are "tricks", you get a volunteer to come up to the front of the class and say "trick or treat" then they pick a trick out of the box. "sing a song", "read some of the history of halloween" "read the vocab list to the class" "dance for 30 secs." - you can make them whatever you want. after they perform the trick they get a treat.i was giving out candy throughout the class to students who were participating - answering the reading comprehension questions, volunteering for the game, the first three to finish the word scramble...anyway, it was a great class, take as many or as few elements of it as you like. if you would like copies of any of the materials that i used, don't hesitate to contact me and i'll send them along. if you check out my "documentarist" blog, i have a whole write up and pictures of the class. Happy Halloween everyone!!!lizm :)

I also did a Halloween lesson!

It was for a conversation class so I wrote on the board:

October 31 - Halloween

Happy Halloween!

Costumes

"Trick-or-treat"

Jack 'O-lantern & black cat

and then I printed out pictures of each (simply found on Google) and explained a little bit about each of the terms. Ex: I explained that you say "Happy Halloween" as opposed to "Merry Halloween", and I gave some examples of tradtional, typical and unique  costumes/etc.)

Then! I had my students each come up with questions about Halloween and all of the topics listed. I was so surprised with how good their questions were! They were really curious, and jealous of Halloween, too! It was fun. If they volunteered to ask their question I had it be their way of "trick-or-treating" and I gave them a candy! It worked really well!

Hint though--be sure to brush up on your Halloween knowledge with Wikipedia, to make sure you can answer the questions!